Zack Snyder’s “Justice League”: Better, but not great

In the middle of production of 2017's "Justice League," director Zack Snyder's family suffered a tragic loss, and he left the picture to grieve and heal alongside his loved ones. Snyder did the right thing, but "Justice League" wasn't allowed to stop. Money and expectations have no patience, so Joss Whedon stepped in to complete the rest of the movie.

Gaining a director, "Justice League" lost its direction. Only when watching this definitive edition do we realize how much of Snyder's vision was sacrificed to get to post-production on time. The final product of "Justice League" (2017) was disastrous. Emotionally and cinematically, "Justice League" was rushed together with the bare minimum of effort. The news of scrubbing Henry Cavill's mustache with millions of dollars of special effects is more entertaining than that film’s Superman.

There isn't a trace of Whedon in this new "Justice League." The scenes Snyder was in charge of are still here (even the bad ones), but everything else is gone, replaced with a bigger, darker, bloodier story.

If the objective, for both viewer and creator, was to witness a better "Justice League" movie, then mission accomplished. Snyder's older scenes blend into this new flow seamlessly, and just for that the editing teams deserve some kind of award. This is a coherent story with a clearer goal, more fleshed-out characters and even a fistful of new ones.

That big relieved sigh of ‘finally’ could be satisfying enough for the few masses that loved Snyder's other contributions to the DC Cinematic Universe. But if you felt like DC's attempt to break Marvel's stranglehold on worldwide box office ended at the exact moment it tried to start (2013's utterly deflating "Man of Steel"), Zack Snyder's “Justice League" won't convince you otherwise.

The bones of the first story are still here: Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds) is a big bad alien come to take over the planet, but this time we better understand why he's doing that, and who he's doing it for. It's fun discovering that Steppenwolf is actually a bitter ex-employee trying to worm his way back into his former boss' favor. The evil(er) boss is Darkseid (Ray Porter), who we get to see in action during an entirely new fight sequence involving the Amazonians (Wonder Woman's family), Green Lanterns, and Zeus.

Now Cyborg (Ray Fisher) has an origin story, one so lengthy it calls to mind Snyder's treatment of "Dr. Manhattan" in "Watchmen" (2009). I wouldn't call it good, but it gives the character leagues of depth compared to what he once was: A robot dude who just kept showing up, making us scratch our heads as to what his exact purpose was.

As an act of storytelling, the Snyder cut is definitely ambitious, as it not only gives each member of the team time to shine (as much as they can in this muted color palette), it finds space to show us what's going on in the personal lives of both main and side characters.

Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and Martha Kent (Diane Lane) are still dealing with the loss of Superman, but in this new cut their grief appropriately matches with an atmosphere that is fogged in loss, as opposed to Whedon’s colorful environments that didn’t do much to suggest humanity’s only hope got wrecked.

This loss cannot be shown quietly. Snyder has a playlist ready to tell us how to feel. There's points here that are basically music videos done in the slowest slo-mo has ever done. My favorite of these weird moments involves Lois and an out-of-left-field application of "Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds." Let's make something clear: If you include a “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds” song in your movie — especially one as amazing as "Distant Sky" — you will earn points with me.

Again, I wouldn't call this extra stuff truly good filmmaking, but its heart is definitely in the right place: Snyder has always wanted us to consider some aspect of these movies — for all their gratuitous slow motion and violence — dramas about otherworldly people and outsiders trying to make the world a safer place for the ones they love and have sworn to protect. There's heart in that, but it's a story that not only has been told many times before in this genre, but is probably being told as we speak by the latest episode of The Lesser Avengers on Disney Minus.

There's parts of this that are human in weirdly wonderful ways. For all the green screen and giant explosions and the weird fact 90 percent of the heroes share roughly the same powers, you get sprinkles of moments like Batman's (Ben Affleck) first meeting with Aquaman (Jason Momoa), wherein Icelandic women calmy arrive from out of frame and sing for their merman benefactor. It's lovely, and it's given a calm minute of attention so that we may appreciate it, and in a film of such noise and destruction, anything involving people speaking or acting from the heart means more than it typically would.

Again, that doesn't make it great. Writer Chris Terrio struggles to combine all the different personalities into a believable unit. Like in the crappy Whedon cut, the heroes say moody stuff about the hard road ahead, and then they get to that precarious moment and succeed as though this isn’t their first rodeo together.

One correction you see being made in that regard is The Flash's (Ezra Miller) former uselessness, but this time they oversteer, making The Flash so powerful Batman immediately looks pitiful.

Speaking of Batman, not much here is different about him. In my opinion, he has no great scenes. He has the same conversations with his reluctant enabler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) about how "this is a suicide mission" and "I made a promise to Superman." All the fight is out of him, now we just get a tired excuse for Batman using futuristic equipment, looking like he's playing one of those Chuck-E-Cheese arcade games where you use plastic weapons slick with pizza grease.

Batman has no room to Batman here. He is so terminally outmatched that even when face-to-face with a single grunt from Steppenwolf's army he gets his ass handed to him. Like in "Batman v. Superman," Batman's special abilities have more to do with his money and gadgets and casual human rights violations than his MMA skills or detective work.

So much thought was put into getting it right this time around, and yet this is still such a thoughtless story with thoughtless characters. The purest, most inspiring, and heroic thing about it is Snyder himself; his determination to return to and realize a vision he still cares about.

"Justice League" offers so much that I have no doubt many will consider this a redemption, but despite being abundant with new characters and epic set-pieces, I can't shake the words "self-indulgent" from my head. It doesn't help when you look at where Snyder leaves us. With his blank check, he went ahead and teased sequels we all know will never happen. It's a weirdly appropriate way to say goodbye to this bizarre mess of a series. If he did that to make us mourn what could have been, he would have been better off with a rambling Tweet, as the last images of this "Justice League" left me with little else to feel but gratefulness that it was finally, at long last, over.